The All-New Bunrab

We are visiting fairs this summer - it's a project. The first couple of fairs were in July - quite early as ag fairs go.

Week of July 26: the Cecil County fair, up in Elkton. Admission to this one is only $2 for seniors, and that's 60+ so that we both count as seniors, so we didn't bother aiming for Senior Day, though if we had, according to the schedule, there would have been several hours of senior-specific things going on. We went on Wednesday. This fair opens to the public at 9, but several of the shows aren't until afternoon, so we aimed for getting there at noon, as with last week. This is our longest drive, 75 miles to get there, and thanks to roadwork and random traffic, it took us nearly 2 hours, so we actually got there at 12:30. This was instantly, obviously, a better-run fair than Washington County; they had guys directing parking, and marked handicapped spaces, and an actual front gate with cheery young people staffing the admissions kiosks. We asked about food, and the young lady pointed us toward it. The midway wasn't open at this one either - according to the website http://www.cecilcountyfair.org/ it opens at 5. So no fair food here, either - the Lions Club has their own little permanent building and they were serving lunch, a limited menu but the fair special of "Chicken Fingers and Freedom Fries" was quite reasonably priced and lots of food, and despite the silly name, the french fries were good. They have a picnic table area in the shade.  The food area has wi-fi - of /course/ it does; there were several people with their laptops, who appeared to be exhibitors (you can sort of tell them - the uniform of shorts and well-worn tall boots tells you who's mucking out stalls.)

After lunch we started walking around - this is still a small fairgrounds, compared to some, but they have enough permanent buildings to put on a good show. We went through the commercial building first, which was pretty dead in the water except for a Tupperware lady and a Bible Association; all the other booths were unstaffed. There was an additional tent with more vendors out back of that, nothing I wanted to buy, and 2 whole booths taken up by a Baptist church - even though we didn't meet anybody's eye, they still started calling out to us. Anyway - Home Arts, small but larger than Washington County. Several quilts, some crocheted items, lots of sewing, and lots of canning - three multi-shelved stands full of jams and pickled veggies and corn relish and so on, very attractive. Lots of kids' art. Decent array of baked goods, though since the building isn't air conditioned some things were sagging. Lots of fans - the temperature was comfortable enough in the shade, and they did not stint on the fans anywhere. Next building over rabbits and pigs. A very few pigs - not a great swine turnout. There were probably as many rabbits as at Washington, but they were poorly caged and poorly labeled; I felt quite sorry for the poor buns; they didn't have enough space or enough ventilation, and a lot of them weren't even labelled by breed. Then on to Poultry, of which there was a decent assortment, a few turkeys and quite a few varieties of chickens. Not as wide a variety as Montgomery County (more later on that) but still a decent variety for a small show, including some of the really silly ones where it's difficult to tell that it's a bird, let alone what species of bird it might be. Onward: goats, and more goats. A few sheep, lots of goats. In fact, the goats took over one of the horse barns as well. Goats like Larry; we always have goats trying to stick their faces up into Larry's face. A couple of cow barns.

By then it was getting warmish; we didn't slog all the way over to the other horse barn, the big one, because it was set off from the
rest, and besides, it was almost time for the afternoon entertainment to start. That's right, real scheduled entertainment, during the day! (The night-time entertainment Wednesday night would be a rodeo; we weren't going to stay for it, but it's apparently a big deal there, and people come specifically for that.) First up, Skybound Canine Entertainment - trained dogs catching discs and jumping through hoops - well, sort of trained: these are all rescue dogs, and part of the point of the show is to show how much you can do in the way of training and playing with even an older dog. The fanciest part of the show was the dock-diving: they had several dogs doing dives into a large pool, and a mini-Australian-Shepherd name of Ray-Ray did a 21 foot dive into the pool. Ray-Ray truly loves his job. A few seconds watching the chainsaw-wood-carving guy (the carvings weren't for sale during the day, but were being auctioned and raffled off at night.) Then over to the Kachunga Alligator Show. Yes, real alligators. No, one can't teach an alligator to do tricks. It's mostly an educational thing; the guy sits on an 8-foot alligator and opens its mouth and explains the teeth, and the alligator's various water adaptations (did you know that alligators can hold their breath for up to an hour?) and then after dragging the alligator around by the tail, he let it go back in its shaded cubby, and brought out 2 baby alligators, and invited all the kids in the audience to come have their pictures taken holding a real live alligator. I found it educational; Larry hadn't though it would be real alligators, so he was surprised. Then, after a few minutes' break, a magic show - nice enough, though the fancy showgirls painted on the sidings were in reality one young man assistant dressed in black. The neatest trick, to me, was turning a white dove into a much larger white rabbit into a full-size white standard poodle. The magician did have each of them wave to us before turning them into something else. He asked for a child volunteer from the audience to help on one trick, but the 2-year-old who volunteered wasn't quite up to the task. Part of the problem was that we were all sitting in the upper bleachers in the shade, rather than the bleachers closer to the stage but out in the direct sunlight. That made it difficult to talk people into things. And it /was/ getting hotter. So, at that point the Young Farmers had opened up their ice cream booth, and we went over and had ice cream, and then headed home, having spent almost 3 and a half hours there.

Verdict? A bit of a long drive for us, but the cheap price of admission, plus the vast improvement in most things over the Washington County fair, made us feel that we did get our money's worth at the Cecil County fair. And if it wasn't so hot and Larry didn't have to work Thursday, staying for the rodeo (included in the price of admission!) might well have been fun.

and now they go past yours via Twitter:

• 21:58 vanity plate: SCANS #
• 23:27 major accident on I-95 south of exit 35 a couple miles; most emergency veh. are on southbound but a few are on left ln of northb. #
• 23:28 at least 3 fire. 2 ambulance. 2 hwy patol on our side (north) and 4 or more hwt ptrl on south side. South traffic major delay. #
• 23:30 glimpsed one veh. in median ditch, appeared to be SUV, right side up - but there must be more to warrant that turnout. #
• 23:31 for random T readers, the preceding refers to I-95 in Maryland. Prince Georges Cty near Laurel #
• 23:36 thankful for 20 yrs rehearsing w/ Dick Floyd in Austin - sometimes at rehearsals here, one can tell that S & I are only ones watching co ... #
• 23:37 too long? THAT WAS: thankful for rehearsal habits Dick Floyd/ ASB drilled into us over 20 yrs. #
• 23:39 this eve, S & I *only* ones who noticed tempo change at 1 point. #
• 23:41 I am getting better still at reading bass clef bassoon parts; STILL cant transpose tenor clef parts on the fly, though. #
• 15:57 dynamic sign: Use caution caution/ Road work ahead. #
• 15:59 Nannie Helen Burroughs Ave. #
• 16:24 well, we are finally past the roadwork, the everybody-out-of-the-way for a cavalcase, amd the major accident closing 2 of 3 lanes. #
• 16:24 we certainly won't make the 4:15 pm recital #
• 19:33 The Trombone Workshop seems much more orchestra-oriented than the Tuba conference. #

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So we went to the Winterthur on Saturday. They have really nice lunches in their cafeteria, including a fancy dessert table. I spent more time on the "Who's Your Daddy" exhibit than squirrel_magnet or Cindythelibrarian did. We all enjoyed the "Feeding Desire" exhibit - if you're anywhere in the area, that's a great one to go see. Of course right now, the house tour includes Winterfest, which is always beautiful. And mid-afternoon, there was a concert by a Sa"ngerbund - I forget the name of the group, but it was a chorus of about 30 people. Mostly songs we did not know, many of them in German. When we crossed the driveway to the gift shop, we noticed the largest holly tree I have ever seen, somewhere over 30 feet and full of berries. I am used to holly trees being spindly 10 or 12 foot things, and in Texas holly is a shrub; this was most definitely a tree! We got a good deal of holiday present shopping done in the gift shop. On the way home we avoided the evil Delaware toll plaza - on the way up, we were so busy talking, we missed the exit for easiest toll avoidance.

Backing up a bit. I did not wind up making the corn pudding for Thanksgiving. It would have been the last thing to get started, and when I got to that point, I realized that I had every single inch of space in my oven and my toaster oven completely filled with stuff already, more stuff than 8 people could possibly eat. (So I used the corn to make corn chowder late at night for S & I for supper - so we didn't have to eat the leftovers the same day!) We had a nice Auslese Riesling and a lot of apple cider. The day went well. My 7-month-old nephew Luke seems to be attempting to bypass crawling altogether and trying to stand up by himself and learn to walk. We watched "Babe" after dinner, which was popular not only with almost-2 Kyla, but also with my dad. My stepmom gave us a housewarming present, a Tensor floor lamp with a daylight-spectrum bulb in it - and it's dimmable! That will be useful not only for all my needlework but also for S's fiddling with stereo pieces and with gadgets.

Currently reading: Grease Monkey by Tim Eldred - very funny SF graphic novel - and The Eight by Katharine Neville, a thriller about Charlemagne, chess, the French Revolution, and auditing. The number 8 has many meanings in the book, and one of them is the "Big Eight" accounting firms, back when there were still such. Our heroine works for one that is a roman-a-clef Peat Marwick, often known as KPMG; in the book, the names of the firm form an acronym of FCK-U, which pretty much describes the firm's attitude toward its clients, its employees, and everything else.

I love museum gift stores.

Our DSL connection has been down since Thursday a.m. And we were on the road all day friday (I have conceived a deep and lasting hatred for the Hutchinson River and Merritt Parkways in CT; it should NOT take 9.5 hours to get from Baltimore to Worcester!) And we have a wireless connection here at the hotel, but the ergonomics are awful, so I'm not sitting here catching up on 3 days worth of email and LJ friends. One hopes that when we get home Sunday evening, Verizon will have fixed the problem, and I'll catch up then. If you've been wondering why I haven't answered your email/commented/whatever, that's why.

Meanwhile, my cousin's wedding is today, so i ought to get a few hours sleep before we have to get up and get dressed and go do weddingy things.

If I believed in Satan, I'd swear that Delaware is evidence of his work. If not his headquarters, at least his factory outlet, based on the amount of misery it causes in human lives. Certainly it is a blight on the interstate highway system. Apart from the toll - and to anyone who lives somewhere between Virginia and New York, I don't have to say anything more to evoke a picture there - was the fact that on a holiday evening, when thousands of people are returning from visiting relatives, every single mile of interstate highway in Delaware except the last half mile before the toll booths had at least one lane closed, and there were 2 lanes closed (narrowing traffic going south down to 1 lane) in a couple of places. It took us a little more than an hour to go a little less than 23 miles, despite great weather and no accidents and not even any state troopers with radar guns.

I'll grant you, that's not the most egregious waste of the interstate I've ever seen. A few years ago, we drove from Austin to my brother's house in Omaha for Thanksgiving. Coming back Sunday night, we and a few tens of thousands of college students also returning from Thanksgiving with family, to school in Austin, traffic came to a dead halt about 9 miles north of Hillsboro, Hillsboro being where I35E and I35W merge back together to become just I35. It took about 6 hours to get from 9 miles north of Hillsboro , to past the merge point.

And one year in the 70's, I was one of the tens of thousands of college students going from Boston back to New York for Thanksgiving; that Thursday morning, it took about 4 hours to get through the last 2 miles of highway in the Bronx and on over the bridge.

Nonetheless, this past evening's traffic was annoying, even if it wasn't up to those standards. Perhaps because gas is nearly $3 a gallon, one feels more sharply the wasting away of ounces and cups and pints of gas as one idles and stops and lurches a few hundred feet and stops again.

Despite the above peeve, we had a nice day. One can't call it a quiet, peaceful day, not with my sister having 5 kids, but it was fun. We had a big Sunday afternoon dinner, both preceded and followed by lots of conversation and assorted crafts and stuff. I taught Ian how to use a rigid heddle loom, which he caught onto right away, and by two hours later had pretty much outgrown the small "toy" (but real in its pieces and methods) loom that made little 4" squares (to be used as coasters, or sewn together by hand to make bigger pieces), completing a second square in about 1/4 the time the first one took him, including doing the warping by himself. So I imagine that by next weekend everyone in the family will have all the coasters they can possibly use, and I'd better find an excuse for a gift occasion soon to give him a larger loom that will challenge him for a bit longer. (Everyone in the extended family on out to grandparents and cousins now has potholders from the potholder loom I gave him at Christmas!!) I'm going to see if I can find an 18" rigid heddle loom that actually has rollers so that one can set up several YARDS of warp at one go, and make scarves and table runners and place mats and shawls; normally those cost close to $100 but I will scout for a used one. Ah, I love passing along my bad habits and expensive hobbies to the next generation!